Uncharted Territory

Some of my friends take off of aircraft carriers in fighter jets (not exaggerating!) while I'm happy if I can land a cessna on the center line (harder than it looks!). Some of my friends are dating, married, or engaged to amazing and/or hot girls, while I occasionally try to talk to a barista at starbucks. Well, not after today...but thats a different story. Why am I telling you this? To establish the context for baby steps.

I signed up for meetup.com because one of my friends told me I should try it. And because I've been rejected by a dating site. Seriously, who ever gets rejected by the site itself? If I believed in karma I would think this is payback for all the times I wrote "On Error Resume Next" as a visual basic programmer (if you can't guess why that makes me a terrible person, don't ever become a computer programmer--the world will thank you). Anyway, I had a brief fling with meeup.com-like sites when I lived in Philly, which resulted in me driving like 40 minutes to some random gym in Jersey to play volleyball with slightly melodramatic people that spent more time talking about what went wrong with the last hit than actually playing (seriously I'm not exaggerating about this one either). I also tried to join a book club that was reading through Crime and Punishment, but failed somewhere around page 70 when I decided that all of the great and famous literary novels of human history can kiss my ass. Who needs to spend that much prose to talk about going to a bar?

Saturday I was stuck at home; I don't remember why, but the tv was on and I found myself combing through all of the various meetup groups in seattle looking for ones that didn't suck. I found plenty that did. There was one group for people who want to be activists for separating church and state. That's retarded. We've had a separate church and state since like 1776-ish. According to the history classes I took as a kid, we invented separate churches and states. So I'm a little annoyed people think they need to fix something that isn't broken. Please stop going around removing random religious-looking monuments I haven't seen yet. And who cares about fire halls with christmas trees? Anyone who is bothered by that enough to do anything more than whine about it to their friends should go visit a country where the church and state are still married. Like maybe go make out on a beach in Dubai (seriously please do research before ever following any of my suggestions) and let me know how that works out for you.

Oh, and there was another group for Single Choice Mothers. I had a little trouble figuring it out. Based on simple word association, I estimated that the group was for unmarried women who were interested in some kind of post-natal abortion. I was pretty sure everything out of the womb was off limits for that kind of thing, so I dug around on the meetup site to get more information about it. It turns out, that group means the opposite: its for unmarried women who want to become mothers. Like in that 80's movie with the talking baby. And in the tv show House. So I wasn't eligible. Oh, and there was another group for people looking to explore their sexuality in the most creepy-sounding way possible. Seriously, if--I'm not going to finish this paragraph.

So that was all the clubs I didn't join. I joined a bunch that I thought wouldn't suck and immediately started receiving emails for events I didn't want to go to. Like, there is this climbing gym out here--ok we have to back up for a second.

People who climb rock faces, or walls with fake rocks on them, often attach themselves to a rope, and a person stays on the ground to "belay" them, constantly pulling out the slack and acting as a safety net and guide. Or, in Kyle's case, telling me over and over again that I can't come down yet. But I digress. There is an awesome little tool called an ATC that the person belaying uses to lock the rope when the climber falls. The ATC has no moving parts and works completely on the principles of friction and tension. It is probably the coolest device I have ever seen or heard of in my life, surpassing my previous favorite, the torque converter. Every rock gym on the planet that doesn't suck lets their climbers use ATCs.

A long time ago, when the universe was young, the Devil, a.k.a. Loki, a.k.a. Satan, a.k.a. Bill Gates, invented another climbing device, the greargory, which I deliberately mispelled because I hate it, and I was recently shocked 20 seconds ago when I googled belay devices to get this link and found out how it is actually spellled. The purpose of the grigri is to annoy the person belaying, sucking all of the joy out of climbing until the belayer can think of nothing else but how much they hate grigris. Anyway, long story short: when God (a.k.a. Gordon Freeman, a.k.a. Hugh Jackman) created hell, he made a lake of burning sulfur surrounded by rock walls that can only be climbed with a grigri, so that people like Hitler and all the morons in Seattle that don't use turn signals would be banished there to be tormented forever by these infernal climbing devices. It is a little known fact that grigri's were used to torture prisoners in rural siberia between 1928 and 1931, when they were replaced by milder forms of torture like water boarding and tapes of Fox News.

Ok back to the present. Well, almost. There are two gyms in Seattle. One is called Vertical...something, and the other is called Stone Gardens. Vertical whatever uses grigris, because they hate climbers, and Stone Gardens uses ATCs. I <3 ATCs. And google obliterated the rest of the paragraph because I typed "I <3 ATCs" and google thought I was trying to write html. Seriously I can't be the first person who tried to type a "<3" into blogger. Am I?!? Imagine what havoc might ensue if I tried something on purpose.

Which brings me to the point of this post: I think I signed up for a singles group. It didn't look like a singles group, or maybe I was too distracted by the tv. I don't know. But I'm a part of it now, and I got an invitation for an event that involved a dance contest with models that are allegedly hot. And I signed up. I spent a lot of time analyzing the invitation, trying to figure out exactly what kind of dance contest it is, but they don't say. I don't know if its like a swing dance contents, or like a craphop ugly rap dancing contest, or what. And I definitely don't know if going at all is a good idea. Its a "singles" event, and its at the kind of bridge-and-tunnel bar I hate going to. And I never, ever want to be at anything remotely like a singles event--I was actually planning to go to my grave a lonely, bitter man before attending any kind of part or event with the plural form of "single" in the title. Unless it was going to be "the party for sexy female singles that want to meet me now that I'm a rock star."

But it could actually be cool: if I have the option of doing salsa I have a good shot at winning the contest, because dancing for a performance, or to show off, is a lot easier than dancing for real. Also this stupid party thing is like a block away from where I work.

So, basically, the only way to find out if this is a good opportunity is to take it. If I let it pass by, I won't know if I made the right decision, even if the right decision was to stay the hell away from this B&T on singles night. I'm starting to think most opportunities are like that--the only way gain information about them is to take them. I really hope I'm wrong, because taking opportunities and trying new things is exhausting. If I didn't have this tragic need to interact with other people I could just sit at home every night watching movies, playing video games, eating doritos and drinking mountain dew. The hourly rate of a movie rental is approximately 3.37% of the cost of renting a Cessna 172. Curious...I dont know why I loved doritos so much when I played video games regularly; they are like the worst snack food ever for someone trying to use a keyboard.

This ridiculous charade takes place tomorrow night. Maybe I'll chicken out. Maybe I'll go and have the worst time of my life. Maybe I will make a fool of myself and be outed and embarrassed--or worse--be forced to dance to hip hop. I don't know. What I do know, though, is that I'm planning to go and double fist the captain and make the best run of it that I can (thats what she said).